Richard Socher
Co-founder and CEO of You.com and Recursive
A researcher behind ImageNet and GloVe who founded MetaMind, led AI at Salesforce, and now runs You.com and Recursive.
Biography
Richard Socher is a German-born computer scientist who focuses on AI research. Born in Dresden in 1983, he earned degrees from the University of Leipzig and Saarland University and completed a PhD in computer science at Stanford University in 2014, advised by Christopher Manning.
He was a researcher on the ImageNet visual database and, in 2014, co-authored GloVe, an open-source algorithm that embeds words in multi-dimensional vectors. He founded MetaMind in 2014, which Salesforce acquired in 2016, and served as Salesforce's chief scientist. In 2020 he left to co-found You.com, an AI search infrastructure company that raised $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in September 2025. In 2025 he also co-founded Recursive, a company pursuing recursive self-improvement in AI, which emerged from stealth in May 2026 with more than $650 million raised. He is a co-founder and investment partner of AIX Ventures, and his book The Eureka Machine was published in September 2026.
Notable contributions
Co-authored GloVe
Co-authored GloVe in 2014, an unsupervised algorithm that embeds words in multi-dimensional vectors and was widely used for natural language processing.
Worked on ImageNet
Was one of the researchers who, with Fei-Fei Li, developed ImageNet, the large visual database for object recognition research.
Founded MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce
Founded MetaMind in 2014; Salesforce acquired it in 2016 and Socher became its chief scientist.
Co-founded You.com
Left Salesforce in 2020 to co-found You.com, an AI search infrastructure company.